Moving our home base from WordPress to itch

Hey! For those we're meeting for the first time here, we're the Dai-Sukima Dan, a visual novel dev group. We started developing an ambitious Touhou VN called Eastern Starlight Romance way back in 2009. It's quite far along, but due to team members' various IRL obligations and circumstances, it's mostly been on hold for several years now. Still, we're at least keeping our web presence alive and holding onto the hope of finishing one day!

15 years ago we started a WordPress blog and Invision forum, and the setup served our team well, especially in those early days. However, it's been challenging at times to maintain the website and keep it secure. That effort and the cost of hosting have felt much less worth it in recent years, especially with our lack of activity. I want to spend more of my limited energy working on the game, and less energy working on the DSD website.

Hostgator will renew our 3-year plan in June if we leave it as is, so it's time to make our move: we've decided to relocate our home base to here, itch.io. We'll no longer have to worry about PHP and WordPress updates breaking our plugins and styles, keeping user accounts safe in our database, implementing anti-spam measures, getting hacked, etc. Or at least that'll all be itch's responsibility, not ours. And the only thing we'll be paying for is the daisukimadan.net domain, which we'll soon set up to redirect to this itch page.

We chose itch because it seemed like a good fit for small dev teams, VNs, and our relatively low-key presence these days. Steam is obviously a bigger games market, but what we need now is more of an easy, cozy home base rather than a market. And from what we're seeing so far, itch's features are probably good enough to communicate with you folks who might still be following ESR. We'll turn on comments for these devlog posts, and there's also a discussion-board option that we can enable if needed later. If we end up outlasting itch down the road, then we can revise our domain redirect to point somewhere else.

The main downside to all this is the challenge of preserving our articles, threads, and screenshot galleries from the old site. Perhaps the galleries will get a new home at some point (if it can't just all fit on our itch somehow), and the old articles/threads can at least be saved on Internet Archive if nothing else. Our other project Touhou Mecha can also get an itch page of its own, in its final state of having two chapters complete. This whole migration is obviously a bit of work upfront, but we're hopeful that in the long run, a lower-maintenance setup like this will help us recharge and eventually refocus on ESR.

Finally, a little personal note, since longtime followers may not recognize my username. I now go by Joselle (she/her); I used to go by SleepKirby (he/him). This is something I've been sitting on for a good 2-3 years, and while we're already setting up new accounts and stuff, it's as good of a time as any to come out. So yeah, I see the world pretty differently compared to the early days of DSD... and, one way or another, I'm sure many of you can say the same. Thanks for sticking around after all this time!